Why Your Water Utility Should Be Using Hydraulic Modeling

Water utilities strive to ensure consistent and high-quality water service to growing populations, all while constrained by limited financial and labor resources. These challenges, combined with sustainability pressures, mean water utilities must do everything possible to keep their systems running at peak efficiency.

Many tools exist that water utilities can use to keep increasingly complex distribution systems performing optimally. One of the most useful but often under-utilized tools is hydraulic modeling. While many water utilities have a pen-and-paper or CAD diagrams of the distribution network from when the system was first built, these systems change over time. The models gradually become outdated and updating them can be difficult and time-consuming.

Hydraulic modeling changes all this. This article will examine the value proposition of hydraulic modeling, which includes a vast range of benefits such as improving system performance, long-term infrastructure planning, predicting and anticipating demographic changes, and more.